Posts Tagged ‘Russia’

The controversy over the FBI’s investigation of President Donald Trump is basically a behind-the-scenes battle over U.S. policy toward Russia.

Trump is being attacked because he wanted to improve relations with Russia, while the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties, the Washington press corps, the Pentagon and the so-called “intelligence community” seem hell-bent on reviving the Cold War, or worse.

My reason for thinking so is that the anti-Trump campaign suddenly stopped when he ordered a missile attack on Russia’s ally, Syria. And my suspicion is that it would stop again if he started making threats to Russia over Syria or Ukraine.

That’s not to say that Trump or members of his team may not have done something wrong. It is just that those in government who are leaking all this anti-Trump information are doing it as a means to an end—to damage Trump politically and sabotage attempts to improve relations with Russia.

The Real News Network broadcast broadcast a good discussion of this subject with Robert English, an expert on Russia. As English noted, the things that are coming out about Trump are either trivial, or without evidence, or similar to things previous Presidents have done.

He pointed out that the elder George Bush committed a much more serious security breach than Trump is currently being accused of, and that the younger George Bush intentionally released classified information to destroy the reputation of a whistle-blower within the administration.

We Americans like the spectacle of war, but, since the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam Conflict, only a small minority of us has had an appetite for actual fighting.

President Donald Trump’s attack on Syria shows that he understands this. It was a kind of minimalist attack. The Syrian government was given a general notice that an attack was coming, and the Russian government a specific attack, so that casualties and damage were minimal.

Except for the unfortunate Syrian troops who were killed, this was war theater, not war.

Yet he got credit for acting decisively. Deeply unpopular before, he has been applauded by the press, Congress and even Hillary Clinton, while even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren equivocated. All the speculative news about Trump conspiring with Putin has vanished from the front pages.

I fear Trump has learned a bad lesson. When unpopular, rally Americans by attacking a designated foreign enemy. But since these attacks won’t change anything, he’ll have do something each time that is more impressive than what he did the time before, which means a higher risk of sliding from token war into general war.

I don’t think that Trump scared Bashar al Assad, Hassan Rouhani, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-on. I think they understand what is going on very well. I don’t think they can be bluffed or intimidated. As my father said, never start a fight you are not prepared to finish.

The New Yorker ran a long article about Russian propaganda and how the Russian government sees propaganda as a weapon of war.

The article, though one-sided, contains interesting information. My problem with it is that the writers treat propaganda—including truthful propaganda—as the equivalent of war.

The U.S. government during the past 15 years has waged war by means of aerial bombardment, targeted assassinations, economic sanctions, arming terrorists and warlords and actual invasions of foreign countries that do not threaten us. Russia has done some of the same things, although on a smaller scale.

There is a strong possibility of a military confrontation between Russia and the United States that could risk a nuclear war.

Russian attempts to influence American and European public opinion seem fairly benign in contrast.

When Al Qaeda jihadist terrorists attacked the U.S. World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, it was part Osama bin Laden regarded the USA as the “far enemy” who propped up all the “near enemies” in the Arab world.

But for many of the jihadists fighting in Syria and Iraq, the “far enemy” is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, not the USA. A large number are Chechens, a Muslim nationality living mostly within the Russian Federalion, or Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kazakhs or others living under regimes in Central Asia that are propped up by Russia.

One of Putin’s first actions when he came to power was to ruthlessly crush the independence movement in Chechnia. The justification was a series of terrorist attacks that were very likely a false flag attack by the Russian FSB.

Since then many Chechen fighters have been driven out of Russia, and are now fighting the Russian-backed Assad government of Syria, along with Uzbeks and other nationalities from the former Soviet republics.

Some analysts think that the export of jihadists is a conscious Russian strategy. The best outcome, from the Russian point of view, is that they die fighting in Syria. But even if they survive, they have made themselves known to Russian intelligence services.

Saudi Arabia does the same thing with its jihadist rebels—suppresses them at home and encourages them to go wage war in other countries.

One good thing which I hoped to see in a Trump administration was a détente with Russia.

Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and in her campaign record seemed hell-bent on a military confrontation with Russia, the one country with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the United States, over issues that matter very little to the American people.

It looks like this hope will be fulfilled. Unfortunately Trump seems hell-bent on a military confrontation with China, and also with Iran. This, too, could turn out badly for the United States and everybody else, although for different reasons.

President Trump isn’t even in office yet, and his lifetime success strategy is based on being unpredictable, so I don’t claim to be able to foresee what he will do.

But based on his appointments and his rhetoric, it appears as if he intends to intensify the “pivot to Asia” begun under the Obama administration.

The problem with this, from the U.S. standpoint, is that China is a stronger economic power than the United States. By some measures, it has a larger gross domestic product. It has a stronger manufacturing economy. The United States has a trade deficit with China. The U.S. government probably could finance its budget deficit without selling some of its Treasury bonds to China, but it would be more difficult.

The economy is shrinking. Although unemployment is low, poverty is increasing, Inflation is at double-digit rates. The exchange rate for the ruble is falling. Russia’s trade deficit is widening. The Russian government is cutting spending on public services.

While Russia has serious internal economic problems, the immediate cause of the crisis is the economic war being waged by its foes.

The United States and European Union boycott many Russian individuals and institutions, including cutting off credit to Russian banks and cutting off sales of equipment to Russian oil companies.

Saudi Arabia has stepped up production of oil, driving down oil prices worldwide and hurting Russia’s oil exports.

The United States has begun a new arms race with Russia, forcing the Russian government to either divert resources from the civilian economy or admit inferiority.

In waging economic war against Russia, the United States and its allies hurt themselves as a price of hurting Russia more.

My experience and knowledge of foreign countries is limited, but I try to understand foreign leaders by putting myself in their place, and imagining what I would do if I were them.

Peter Hitchens, a Briton who was a foreign correspondent in Moscow for many years, invites us to imagine how we would feel if we were Russians, a nation that, unlike the USA, has been invaded not once, but many times, and lost millions, not thousands, of lives to invaders within living memory.

Safety, for Russians, is something to be achieved by neutralizing a danger that is presumed to exist at all times. From this follows a particular attitude to life and government.

If the U.S. had China on the 49th Parallel and Germany on the Rio Grande, and a long land border with the Islamic world where the Pacific Ocean now is, it might be a very different place. There might even be a good excuse for the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.

If Russia’s neighbors were Canada and Mexico, rather than Germany, China, Turkey, and Poland, and if its other flanks were guarded by thousands of miles of open ocean, it might have free institutions and long traditions of free speech and the rule of law. It might also be a lot richer.

As it is, Russia is a strong state with a country, rather than a country with a strong state. If it were otherwise, it would have gone the way of the Lithuanian Empire or, come to that, the Golden Horde.

That is not to say that life in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is good, or that Putin is a benign ruler. But he is no worse than many of the despots with whom the United States is allied, and life in the Russian Federation is infinitely preferable to live in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republicans.

Far from being a new Hitler, Hitchens wrote, his goal is to keep territories formerly controlled by the USSR from joining anti-Russian alliances. Whatever you think of this, it is not a threat to the United States or any other Western nation.

In September, 1999, Russia was wracked by a series of explosions that President Vladimir Putin blamed on Chechen terrorists.

It solidified Putin’s power and popularity, and enable him to launch his own “war on terror” against the breakaway province of Chechnya.

But unlike with the 9/11 attacks on the United States two years later, there is strong circumstantial evidence that the explosions were a false flag carried out by Russian intelligence services.

David Satter, a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, summed up the evidence in a recent article in National Review.

The Chechens are a fierce Muslim warrior people whose homeland is in the Caucasus. They were conquered by the Russian Empire in 1859 and declared independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up. The Russian Federation tried and failed to reconquer them in 1994-1996.

At the time of the explosions, Vladimir Putin, formerly head of the Russian Federal Security Services (FSB), had just become prime minister of Russia. He used the explosions as a justification for starting a new war, in which Chechnya was defeated and reincorporated into Russia.

There were four apartment bombings in all, in which a total of 300 people were killed. One was in an apartment building in Buinaksk in Dagestan in the Caucasus, two in apartment buildings in Moscow (9/9 and 9/13) and one in Volgodonsk in Rostov province to the south (9/16). All the explosions involved hundreds of pounds of an explosive called RDX.

Suspicious characters with traces of RDX on their persons were arrested in an apartment building in the southern Russian city of Ryazan. They turned out to be FSB agents. The FSB said they were conducting a training exercise.

I think that, based on her record and rhetoric, Hillary Clinton would put the USA at greater risk of nuclear war than her predecessors.

As adviser to her husband in the 1990s and as Secretary of State, she was a voice for war. Her campaign web site is about her credentials as a war hawk. It is no coincidence that so war hawks of the George W. Bush support her for President.

Victoria Nuland

Her protege, Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, promotes economic warfare and covert warfare against Russia, while promoting regime change in Ukraine and attempting to draw Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian alliance. This is as dangerous as Khrushchev’s placing missiles in Cuba in 1962.

Pro-Russian news sources predict war if Hillary Clinton is elected. I think Russian fears are significant because they could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think somebody is poised to attack you, you’re going to be ready to strike at them before they do.

The risk is not that an American or Russian President would deliberately start a nuclear war. The risk is that U.S. policy is creating a situation in which a nuclear war could be touched off by accident.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. government has cancelled the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, installed a missile defense system in Rumania and is in the process of installing a system in Poland.

What is the harm of a defensive system? It is that the ruler of a country with a missile defense system might be tempted to launch a missile attack, in the hope that the enemy’s retaliatory missiles might be stopped.

A defense system that is not strong enough to stop an enemy’s first strike attack might be strong enough to defend against retaliation from an attack, since much of the enemy’s weapons will have been destroyed. So, strange as it may seem, setting up a missile defense system can seem like an aggressive act.

There is only one nation in the world with the power to destroy the USA, and that is Russia, with its stockpile of 1,800 operational nuclear weapons. Russia would be destroyed in the process, so its leaders would be insane to attempt this unless Russia’s own survival were at risk.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have brought this danger closer by extending NATO forces to the borders of Russia, conducting military exercises close to Russia and attempting to draw Ukraine and Georgia into an anti-Russian alliance.

I can understand why some people in the Baltic states, Poland and other countries formerly under Soviet domination might want U.S. protection and even a U.S. attack on Russia (just as some people in the Caribbean and Central American countries might want the reverse.)

The problem is that NATO forces probably could not defeat the Russia army in a war close to Russia’s borders, just as Russia could not successfully defend a Caribbean or Central American country.

It’s generally admitted that NATO in Cold War times could not stopped a Red Army invasion of western Europe. That is why the U.S. government has never pledged “no first use” of nuclear weapons. The US depended on nuclear weapons as an ultimate deterrent, and still does.

Another danger is that, if Russia’s leaders felt threatened, they might strike first. Or war might be triggered accidentally, as has almost happened many times in the past.

Terrorist movements such as ISIS and Al Qaeda are criminal and loathsome, but they do not threaten the existence of the United States. Nuclear war does.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama took office saying they intended to improve relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The fact that this didn’t happen makes me wonder about the power of the un-elected Deep State that Mike Lofgren and others have written about.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign team includes John and Tony Podesta, lobbyists for Sberbank, Russia’s largest financial institution.

Hillary Clinton and John Podesta

John Podesta, the chair of the Clinton campaign, and his brother Tony, a bundler of Clinton campaign contributions, are the founders and heads of the Podesta Group, one of Washington D.C.’s top lobbying firms. They registered the firm at a lobbyist for Sberbank, as required by law, at the end of March.

Of course the Podesta Group has plenty of domestic clients as well, and it isn’t unusual for a K-Street lobbying firm to have foreign clients. Hiring lobbyists is what both citizens and foreigners think they have to do to be heard in Washington.

Russia has played a master stroke in the current oil crisis by taking the lead in forming a new cartel, but it’s a move that could spell geopolitical disaster.

The meeting between Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela on 16 February 2016 was the first step. During the next meeting in mid-March, which is with a larger group of participants, if Russia manages to build a consensus—however small—it will further strengthen its leadership position.

Until the current oil crisis, Saudi Arabia called the crude oil price shots; however, its clout has been weakening in the aftermath of the massive price drop with the emergence of US shale.

The smaller OPEC nations have been calling for a production cut to support prices, but the last OPEC meeting in December 2015 ended without any agreement.

Now, with Russia stepping in to negotiate with OPEC nations, a new picture is emerging. With its military might, Russia can assume de facto leadership of the oil-producing nations in the name of stabilizing oil prices.

I don’t see Russia’s Vladimir Putin as a threat. He has been backed into a difficult corner.

Russia’s economy suffers under economic sanctions, the Russian intervention in Syria isn’t going as well as hoped, and the Russian governmental structure is riddled with corruption.

But Russia has a nuclear force second only to the USA. Russia is the only national in the world with the power to bring about the mutual destruction of itself and the USA.

It is a bad idea to back Vladimir Putin into a corner in which he thinks Russia is threatened, over matters in which the United States has no vital interests.

President Obama says Putin is an aggressor. If so, he is a highly unsuccessful aggressor.

Russia’s position is much weaker than it was five years ago. Back then, Russia had good relations with Ukraine and it was integrated into Russia’s economy. Now the best Putin can hope for is continued Russian occupation of Crimea, a devastated eastern Ukraine friendly to Russia and a hostile western Ukraine.

The Syrian situation reminds me of a remark by Adam Smith in (I think) The Wealth of Nations — about how masterminds who think of themselves as master chess players, using other people like pieces on a chessboard, will find the people they think they are manipulating are actually playing their own game.

The aims of the U.S. government in the Middle East are, in no particular order, to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, to counter the growing power of Iran and to destroy the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh).

The bitter experience of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions means that the American people will not tolerate a large-scale intervention with ground troops, so American leaders, including the principal Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, look for pawns to carry out U.S. purposes.

Here is a rundown on these pawns and the games they are playing.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirate governments, all predominantly Sunni Arab nations, fear the rise of Shiite Iran and Shiite power in Iraq much more than they do Sunni Arab ISIS or al Qaeda. To the extent they fear ISIS and al Qaeda, it is more as an internal threat, and they are happy to see their local rebels go off to fight and maybe die for ISIS. The Saudi government doesn’t crack down on individuals who contribute to ISIS because they reflect the beliefs of Wahabism (aks Salafism), the harsh version of Sunni Islam that rules Saudi Arabia.

The Kurds in northern Syria and Iraq are fighting ISIS effectively, but they are fighting to defend themselves and their goal of an independent Kurdistan, to be carved out of the existing territory of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, not as part of any overall “war on terror”. They aren’t going to give up that goal just because it is inconvenient to the USA.

The Turkish government desires the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria and the suppression of Kurdish nationalism more than suppression of ISIS. Oil from ISIS-controlled territory enters Turkey, and money and arms go from Turkey to ISIS. Turkish politicians talk of the glories of the Ottoman Empire and of the unity of ethnic Turks across Asia.

The Iraqi government desires to prevent breakaway movements, whether ISIS, other Sunni Arab fighters or Kurds.

The Sunni Arab militias and tribal leaders in Iraq blame the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and setting up an Iraqi government dominated by Shiite Arabs, so they’re not willing to be U.S. proxies in a campaign against ISIS.

The Shiite Arab militias in Iraq hate ISIS, but their leaders distrust the United States and won’t work with Americans.

The “moderate Arab” rebels in Syria primarily desire to get rid of Bashar al-Assad and talk about fighting ISIS primarily to obtain U.S. weapons – many of which wind up in the hands of ISIS, al-Nusra and like groups.

The Iranian government desires to support Shiite Muslims against all enemies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey or ISIS, and to defend Syria and also Hezbollah, which represents the Shiite Muslims in Lebanon.

The Syrian government is an enemy of ISIS because ISIS is an existential threat to its existence. But the Assad regime regards the other Syrian rebels and the Kurdish separatists as equally threatening

This leaves Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin justifiably fears the influence of ISIS and other jihadist terrorists on the large Muslim population in the Caucasus and other regions of the Russian Federation. He also wants to defend Russia’s Syrian ally and keep Russia’s naval station in Syria. But for him, the war against ISIS is a war of self-defense, not merely a means of extending Russian influence.

If fighting ISIS is the top U.S. priority, then the U.S. government should find a way to cooperate with Russia against ISIS. If the U.S. government is unwilling to cooperate with Russia against ISIS, then fighting ISIS is not the top U.S. priority.

Is Vladimir Putin’s objective in Syria to destroy ISIS or to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad? It seems to me that the answer is “yes”.

I’ve read articles criticizing Putin for concentrating Russian airstrikes on rebels other than ISIS. Some of these articles hint that Putin or maybe even Assad are secretly supporting ISIS.

I think this criticism mistakes the nature of air power. Command of the air can be devastatingly effective when used in combined operations with ground troops. But bombing alone, in and of itself, seldom defeats a determined enemy.

What these maps show is that Putin’s air strikes are concentrated on “rebels” not part of ISIS and not part of the al-Nusra front (formerly known as al Qaeda).

There is, however, no clear distinction between ISIS, al-Nusra and generic “rebels”. Individuals and small bands change affiliations according to the situation, and U.S. weapons given to “rebels” are often acquired by ISIS through capture, gift or sale.

Christoph Reuter of Spiegel Online suggested that Assad wants to defeat the U.S.-backed rebels first and ISIS last, because, so long as ISIS is in the field, he can present himself as the only alternative. I suppose this is possible, but the simpler explanation is that Russia is concentrating on bombing the troops that are actually fighting the Syrians.

A new hereditary oligarchy of wealth is emerging in Russia. But it does not consist of the sons and daughters of millionaires and billionaires. Rather it consists of the sons and daughters of influential officials in the government security apparatus, starting with President Vladimir Putin’s daughter.

They are much like the so-called nomenklatura, the privileged sons and daughters of high-ranking Communist Party officials in the old Soviet Union.

Many of Russia’s millionaires and billionaires got rich by buying up government-owned factories and resources cheap right after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Reportedly when Putin took power, he called in Russia’s richest business people and told them he would not inquire into how they got their wealth—provided they did not oppose his policies.

He meant what he said. Those who did oppose him have been crushed. But even those who keep their heads down and their mouths shut do not feel secure. Many wealthy Russians are investing outside Russia because they don’t think their assets are safe at home.

This is what people in Third World dictatorships do. It doesn’t speak well for Russia’s future.

Republican attacks on President Obama and the Clintons generally amount to straining at gnats while swallowing camels. The House Benghazi Committee’s questioning of Hillary Clinton fits this pattern.

She was questioned for 10 hours, nearly continuously, for her alleged neglect of security leading to the murder of an American diplomat in Benghazi, Libya. But nobody asked her about why she instigated a war against a country that did not threaten the United States, throwing innocent people leading normal lives into bloody anarchy.

Just because the United States has the world’s largest and most expensive military doesn’t mean we have the world’s best military. We Americans are complacent because of our wealth, and because we have not faced a serious threat to our existence in 70 years.

Our leaders think we can afford to waste money on high-tech weapons that don’t work, and military interventions that aren’t vital to American security. Other nations, which have less margin of safety and would be fighting near their own borders, may be a match for us.

Neither South Korea nor Australia support the U.S.-Japanese opposition to Chinese efforts to claim islands in the South China Sea. The Chinese Navy meanwhile made a point about freedom of the seas by sailing through Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

Icelandic courts have sentenced 26 bankers to prison terms for two to five years each—a total of 74 years—for financial fraud and manipulation leading up to the financial crash of 2008.

The important precedent here, and the great contrast with the United States, is that Iceland prosecuted individuals, not banks. An organization structure cannot commit crimes, any more than a bank building can commit crimes. It is the individuals within the structure who have criminal responsibility.

High-quality jade is the most valuable product of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. But the government and people of the country get little benefit from it. Instead the trade is controlled by military elites, corporate cronies and U.S.-sanctioned drug lords.

The Sunni-Shiite war is a tragedy, but it would burn itself out if Saudi Arabia and Iran were not using the two Islamic factions are proxies in their struggle for power in the Middle East.

The lineup is Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the Shiite militias on one side, and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Turkey and the Sunni militias on the other.

The U.S. government has inflamed the conflict further by taking the side of Saudi Arabia. This has undermined our “war on terror,” because Al Qaeda and ISIS are among the Saudi-backed Sunni militias warring against Syria.

Now Russia is befriending Iran and giving military assistance to Syria, and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq is thinking of calling in Russian help. All this is in the name of fighting ISIS, which is a good thing, not a bad thing. But if Russia is lining up permanently with Iran’s proxies against the U.S.-backed Saudi proxies, this is quite another thing.

A U.S.-Russian proxy conflict would increase human suffering in the Middle East, and be of no benefit to the American or Russian peoples It would be dangerous for the world.. Washington should open negotiations with Moscow to keep the conflict from escalating further.